Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

By intentional coincidence this past
weekend, I watched Volker Schlöndorff’s and Margarethe von Trotta’s 1975 adaptation
of Nobel Prize winner, Heinrich Böll’s novel, itself a kind of scree against
the German tabloid Bild-Zeitnung and
their fanning of a kind of mass hysteria through their coverage of the
Baader-Meinhof gang. In reaction to his original article, the tabloid labeled
Böll as a terrorist sympathizer, resulting, as Amy Taubin writes in the liner
notes to the Criterion re-issue of this film, in “police harassment, searches,
and wiretaps.” To counter the yellow newspaper’s dishonest reports, Böll shot back
with his wonderful fiction about a young housekeeper, Katharina Blum, who
innocently spends a night and falls in love with a possible terrorist whom the
police are following.

By the next morning, the young woman,
whom her friends call “The Nun” (presumably because of lack of promiscuous
behavior) is arrested, brutally handled, and subjected to intense questioning.
Her house is ransacked, and nearly all of her personal friends are contacted
and subjected to the same intrusive actions. Even worse, the police work
hand-in-hand with the tabloid—simply called “The Paper” in the film—exchanging
documents and information, which suddenly splashes the young Katharina
(wonderfully performed by Angela Winkler) across its front pages, while
accusing her of collaboration with terrorism and labeling her as a whore. Even
the prosperous attorney and his wife for whom she works—well known to the
police force—are tracked down on vacation and scrutinized by the media. “The
Paper” illegally breaks into the hospital room where Katharina’s mother is
dying in an attempt to get a deathbed statement. When she says nothing of
importance, they make it up. All of this Katarina suffers with a quiet and
patient strength, comprehending the necessity, while abhorring their abusive
methods and the newspaper intrusion into her life.

Throughout, she speaks the truth, we are led to believe, about
everything except the relationships of the men in her life, which with great
dignity and strength of purpose, she refuses to reveal. And it is this feminist
aspect of her being that helps us to completely sympathize with her plight. Her
former husband, only too ready to be interviewed and comment of his previous
wife, indicts himself in his act; we can clearly perceive why Katharina has
left him. Another man, with whom she has been having an affair, refuses to come
forward and rescue her. The country home to which she has given her the key,
has now become the hiding place of the so-called terrorist Ludwig (Jürgen
Prochnow). Despite hate letters and salacious offers for sex, however,
Katharina remains firm in her convictions: she is convinced that the police
have no right to intrude upon her personal and inner life. Amy Tubin has
expressed the issue rather nicely:

The men she
encounters react to her sense of self-worth as a

challenge to their
masculinity. When she refuses to play their

game, they become enraged and intent on
destroying her. The

one thing that can
be counted on to unite the various men in

this film across
class and political lines is the need to keep women

in a subservient
position. In the eyes of the law, Katharina is

guilty, first and
foremost, of the crime of being a woman. That

she’s a woman who
refuses to allow the patriarchy to determine

her value compounds
her guilt.

I would only argue that, one man, the
presumed terrorist—found guilty even before the film has begun (the very first
scene reveals he is being secretly filmed and followed)—has given her something
none of the others have, a word she insists remain in the testimony she is
forced to sign: tenderness

Eventually, she is freed and the “terrorist” found to be only a slightly
confused thief. Were the film to end there, it would have brilliantly made its
point, that a culture fixated upon threats ultimately turns its own citizens
into terrorists as well. Unfortunately, the otherwise excellent filmmakers felt
they had to carry Böll’s fiction forward to its melodramatic, if
psychologically rewarding, end. Katharina accepts an interview with the
horrific reporter, Werner Tötges (Dieter Laser). Carrying a gun, she shoots him
down, and the movie ends with a horribly ironic, if inevitable, funeral with
Tötges (and “The Paper”) being eulogized as a hero who has died for the cause
of the freedom of the press. Along with some critics, such as Roger Ebert, I
agree that this ending undercuts the character the film has established,
turning her into simply another victim instead of the strong figure she has
been represented as. With the reporter’s murder, “The Paper” and police can
continue to proclaim their empty paranoia, destroying others whom they inexplicably
“suspect.” The true terror of government and media intrusions into personal
lives is justified in her final act, and can now put her away where her story
can no longer have any significance.

Los
Angeles, August 12, 2013

This
1975 work clearly calls up the illegal public revelations of figures such as
WikiLeaks head Julian Assange, Bradford Manning, and, most explicitly, Edmund
Snowden. Snowden has attempted to warn us that through the vast NSA “haystack”
of billions of emails, telephone messages, and other everyday communications
anyone might possibly be perceived as a terrorist, and, under quick
investigation, perceived to be involved with terrorism simply because of
suspicion. Writing in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Andrew
Liepman, predictably mocked any of us who might fear of government intrusion
into our lives in an article titled “What Snowden got wrong: Everything”:

The government isn’t
interested in your phone call with your

aunt. Unless she’s a
terrorist.

In
the context of the movie I’ve described above, however, almost anyone might be suspected of terrorism. What about an
accidental meeting? An incident like Katharina’s “one-night” encounter? I am a
publisher, focusing on international writing. What if I get an order from
someone from another country (or from the US for that matter) who happens to be a terrorist? Must I personally know
everyone, even their moral values, with whom I communicate? When does one
suddenly become a “needle,” as Snowden suggested, or, worse yet, a kind of
“nettle,” a twisted weed of irritation.

Soon after 9/11 a friend of mine, born and
raised in Pakistan, was suddenly hounded by the CIA or other government figures
who “visited” him even at a university classroom where he teaches. His American
girlfriend was similarly “stalked.” The owner of my office building, described
how he and his secretary were forced to intervene in the case of one of their
tenants—who they had long known—when he was illegally arrested, imprisoned for
a few weeks, evidently, because he had never sought out US citizenship!

With hundreds of Facebook “friends,”
many of whom I’ve never met, am I and others like me in danger of simply
communicating, through photographs and general information, if one of these
unknown readers happened to be suspected of terrorism? I want to answer Mr.
Liepman by reminding him that most of us, these days, live not in a world of
domestic isolation, writing our aunts and grandmothers only, but often
communicate on an international level, sometimes (particularly on the internet)
with people from all over the world. My six blogs (one each on fiction, poetry,
film, theater, travel, and US cultural masterpieces) receive visitors—for which
I’m very pleased—from across the planet.

Finally, I have one aunt who, although
she is not a terrorist, is an evangelical Christian who has written some pretty
awful things, in the past, about President Obama (she is convinced, for
instance, he was not born in the US). Although I no longer communicate with
her, might I be in trouble if I did? Her kind of limited vision of the world
might be seen by some to be as dangerous as that of an outspoken critic of our
country. What happened to Katharina Blum in Schlöndorff’s and von Trotta’s
moving film, might easily occur again. And yellow journalists, print and
digital, are only too ready to help destroy the lives of innocents. One need
only recall the young Brown University student, Sunil Tripathi,* who, missing
from his Providence, Rhode Island room, suddenly was mistakenly rumored by
Reddit and other gossip Facebook posters to have been the second bomber at the
Boston Marathon, reporters soon after camping out on his family’s lawn in Bryn
Mawr, Pennsylvania. Whether because of these accusations or not, Sunil’s body
was found in the waters off India Point Park in Providence on April 23rd,
a victim, evidently, of suicide.

*There are several recountings of this
on the internet and in print. See, for example, The New York Times, April 25, 2013.